The Viable Alternative

When I started my journey of self improvement, one of my goals was to get rid of the persistent, negative voice that I heard in my head that would constantly bring up my past mistakes and tell me that I was a loser, I was going to fail, I was worthless, to give up, etc, etc. This constant chatter took away my confidence, made me thoroughly insecure, and made me reluctant to try anything. Read more…

If you were to hit your leg against something and get a gash on it, you’d of course be in pain. The pain would cause you to walk funny, and it’d make you be guarded as to how you sit down, how you put on your clothes and how you move, because you wouldn’t want to aggravate it to trigger more pain. Read more…

I was challenged by a friend of mine, the creator/author of the blog, Conduit of Healing, to write a blog about the men and emotions, and the proper way for us to deal with them, so, since I’m not a man to turn down a challenge, here goes The Viable Alternative view on how a real man deals with his emotions. Read more…

I rarely if ever watch the news, so really, up until a week ago, about three months after he killed all those people and then himself, I didn’t know much about Elliot Rodger beyond the fact that he was a 22 year old virgin who allegedly had Asperger’s Syndrome and was angry because he couldn’t get any girls. Read more…

Some time ago, I read a book called “Slave Testimonies,” which is a compilation of: letters of slaves written to family members and their masters, interviews of fugitive and slaves freed both before and after the Civil War, transcriptions of testimonies of slaves during abolition meetings, and newspaper articles that covered stories told by runway slaves.

What was particularly interesting to me was that those journalists, abolitionists and historians that wrote the stories recanted by the fugitive slaves before the Civil War perceived that though these runaways that they had the privilege of interviewing were giving them a firsthand account of what slavery was like for them and millions of others, they were still left “wanting” for more because they knew they weren’t talking to the “average” slave. Read more…

Back in the 2000s, I was a huge proponent of positive thinking, and I bought scores of books all for the purpose to cultivate positive thoughts so I can be a successful person who lived an extraordinary life.

However, after about six years on my path of self improvement, I wasn’t any better at being a positive thinker than when I first started. I logically knew that it was good to think positive because positive thinking improved your overall well being by making you happier, it helped cause good things to happen in your life, and it had positive effects on those around you. Read more…

It’s the New Year, 2012 and just like every other New Year, people are running around making New Year’s resolutions.

Many people are skeptical of New Year’s Resolutions because most people are more than willing to make them but rarely ever keep them. An example is that swaths of people make promises to lose weight or get in shape at the beginning of the year and gym memberships soar, with the subsequent effect of gyms across America becoming more crowded. Yet, come early February, the number of people at the gym dwindle down to the size it was in December, before the New Year started. Read more…

Wow, over four months since I’ve put something on here. Shame on me!

I’m sorry, I was actually trying to produce at least one blog entry a month on this site, but with my trip to Miami over the summer and all the “fanfare” involved with preparing for my one month trip, including putting together a sponsorship event, I got sidetracked. Then, coming back, I’ve been in some sort of strange transition where my perception of the world around me is shifting, so I decided to hold off on writing anything until I had a grasp of what’s going on.

It’s been well over three months since I’ve gotten back from Miami, but it’s now starting to dawn on me the effect that this trip has had on me. I see that it’s starting to change me in many ways. Read more…

I’ve been wanting for a long time to blow the lid off a major misconception that people have, so here goes.

I find it funny that when we talk about low self esteem, we often talk about obvious examples such as:

• The morbidly obese woman who eats as an emotional escape.
• The person who has slit his wrists several times in attempt to end his life because he feels he has nothing to live for.
• The woman who continuously attracts abusive men because she feels she’s not worthy of a man who treats her right.
• The guy who has no friends and hides in his basement because he thinks nobody likes him.
• The guy who’s on depression meds because he feels there’s nothing good about his life.

Read more…

I’ve always thought this was a problem, but after reading some of the comments from my last blog about marriage, it became glaringly evident that there is a widespread misunderstanding about the concept of putting yourself first. Read more…